INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Geoffrey Philp
Chris Lord
Duane Locke
Shutta Crum
Karyn M. Wolven
Joseph McNair
Gerald Clark
Paul B. Roth
Fred Wolven
Alan Britt
Joanie Freeman
Jerry Blanton
Steve Beaulieu
Felino Soriano
Tolu Ogunlesi
Running Cub
Helen Losse
Mauve purples behind dawn's distant trees.
The barren limbs of winter bend to brush
earth's thawing leaves. Dried buds float
in bowls of melting ice. Snow bells open.
On the other side of the black waking lake,
lights go on in unshaded apartment windows.
Someone grinds coffee, takes day's measure,
writes on the backs of unfolding dreams.
On a door's welcome wreath of dried twigs,
brown feathers line an old nest with song.
I pick up abandoned shells of blue eggs.
One feels heavy, a thought without wings.
The thought rises, falls open to the page
being read on stage in a curved band shell.
We sit again on the green grass blanket
at West Park in the white summer of '73.
Poets weave sun and wind with my hair.
A sparrow flies away with your torn verse.
We walk together to the intersection,
step over wilds growing through concrete,
talk of Roethke's bedraggled geranium,
Stilwell's eleven lines, his sandals of water,
the muse in the poems of Hall and Kenyon,
Gemini singing the words of Sylvia Plath,
Frost's memorized "miles to go before I sleep."
We reach the crossroads sooner than planned.
I wrap ripe berries in paper leaves.
A small purple bird flies from your hand.
Chris Lord, Ann Arbor